I can’t help but feel slightly hypocritical in dressing you down. What passes for sound doctrine in 21st-century central banking—so-called financial repression, interest-rate manipulation, stock-price levitation and money printing under the frosted-glass term “quantitative easing”—presents us at Grant’s with a nearly endless supply of good copy.

But then something wonderful happened: Markets cleared, and a vibrant recovery began. There were plenty of bankruptcies and no few brickbats launched in the direction of the governor of the New York Fed, Benjamin Strong, for the deflation that cut an especially wide and devastating swath through the American farm economy. But in 1922, the first full year of recovery, the Fed’s index of industrial production leapt by 27.3%. By 1923, the unemployment rate was back to 3.2%. The 1920s began to roar.

And do you know that the biggest nationally chartered bank to fail during this deflationary collapse was the First National Bank of Cleburne, Texas, with not quite $2.8 million of deposits? Even the forerunner to today’s Citigroup remained solvent (though for Citi, even then it was a close-run thing, on account of an oversize exposure to deflating Cuban sugar values). No TARP, no starving the savers with zero-percent interest rates, no QE, no jimmying up the stock market, no federal “stimulus” of any kind. Yet—I repeat—the depression ended. To those today who demand ever more intervention to cure what ails us, I ask: Why did the depression of 1920-21 ever end? Given the policies with which the authorities treated it, why are we still not ensnared?

If you object to using the template of 1920-21 as a guide to 21st-century policy because, well, 1920 was a long time ago, I reply that 1929 was a long time ago, too. And if you persist in objecting because the lessons to be derived from the Harding depression are unthinkably at odds with the lessons so familiarly mined from the Hoover and Roosevelt depression, I reply that Harding’s approach worked. The price mechanism is truer and enterprise hardier than the promoters of radical 21st-century intervention seem prepared to acknowledge.